fuck you, matt binder

On Binder’s ridiculous characterization of the MRA position on school shootings, the argument is that school shootings tell us something about our culture’s treatment of men. Of course they do, since most school shooters are male. Doesn’t statistically higher violent crime rates in minority neighborhoods tell us something about racism and the treatment of minorities in this country? Why would we look at the social context of violent crime and its relationship to race but not look at the social context of school shootings in relationship to masculinity?

What do conservatives say when the left tries to ask questions about what social, economic, and political context produces statistically higher crime rates in black neighborhoods? Oh that’s right, they talk about “personal responsibility,” they admonish us to “quit blaming society,” and so on, do they not? The racist sarcastically says “oh the poor blacks with their welfare and government cheese, all we needed to do was give them money and it would have made their lives better and they wouldn’t be committing crimes!” Isn’t their reasoning *identical* to what Binder did here?

When we talk about school shootings, it’s men cast in the role of potential villains just as surely as blacks are cast in the role of potential villains in the mind of the racist if we’re talking about crime – more proof that feminists think of men the way racist conservatives think about the minorities and the poor. What other groups use the word “entitlement” other than conservatives and feminists? Could the white and bourgeois origins of feminist thinking be any more obvious?

Feminists are quick to point out that most school shooter’s are male, but they aren’t interested in an honest dialogue about why this is, because it would call into question our gender norms and the way women – who are half the culture – contribute to those norms. Women have just as much if not more say-so in what masculinity is, and yet we can never ask questions about women’s expectations of the opposite sex, what role it is that they impose on the other half of the culture, or how this might lead to the kind of social exclusion which produces something like school shootings, among many other forms of social dysfunction and pathology.

All of that would complicate the feminist victimhood narrative. There can never be any suggestion that men are specifically disadvantaged socially or otherwise, and there certainly can be no discussion or even consideration of how it is that women contribute to that problem. Apparently young men shoot up schools because they have so much male privilege and freedom, because their lives are “like a video game set to easy,” yeah? Sound convincing to you? Well, it better, because that’s the only explanation we’re allowed to accept if want to avoid being accused of involuntary celibacy, “sexual entitlement,” and bitterness.

So that’s the conversation we will never be allowed to have. That conversation will be shut off like the flick of a light-switch with the hysterical charges of “blaming women” and “misogyny,” followed by people like Binder vomiting up and projecting their own insecurities of being unattractive and unacceptable to women and accusing others of “bitterness,” “living in their mother’s basements,” “not being able to get laid,” and on and on while they titter about it like insecure 8th graders.

And because that conversation will never happen, because anybody who bothers to try to have it will be accused of predation, social failure, and shamed out of existence, there will never be a solution to the underlying problem.